The metatheatricality of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has invited recent directors to tell particular kinds of socially progressive stories. This article uses the notion of “social reparation” to theorize remedial uses of Shakespeare in adaptations that give artists and audiences more moral agency. By imagining more inclusive local habitations and s…[Read more]

Based in the South throughout his career, the Black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs wrote nearly fifty books and pamphlets, including five novels, nearly all of which he issued through his own publishing companies. Griggs was a founder of American Baptist Theological Seminary, which several Civil Rights Movement leaders attended in the 1950s.…[Read more]

As I have done in connection with another tale about vengeance Edgar Allan Poe published two and a half years earlier, “The Cask of Amontillado,” in what follows I offer a generalized biographical interpretation of the 1849 story “Hop-Frog,” linking it to Poe’s February 1845 essay “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House” and his September 184…[Read more]

The portrayal of narcotrafficking in the novels of Elmer Mendoza.

James Agee’s complicated life and complex work have elicited varied critical responses, but none thus far by way of the writer’s intriguing relationship with his sometime analyst Frances Wickes. I believe Agee’s autobiographical writings prove both intertextual with and influenced by Wickes’s work, especially in regard to her novel and to The Mor…[Read more]

James Agee’s complicated life and complex work have elicited varied critical responses, but none thus far by way of the writer’s intriguing relationship with his sometime analyst Frances Wickes. I believe Agee’s autobiographical writings prove both intertextual with and influenced by Wickes’s work, especially in regard to her novel and to The Mor…[Read more]

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature?

The rise of global Shakespeare as an industry and cultural practice—the incorporation of Shakespearean performance in cultural diplomacy and in the cultural marketplace—is aided by digital tools of dissemination and digital forms of artistic expression. Shakespeare has evolved from a cultural nomad in the past centuries—a body of works with no pe…[Read more]

This is a book review that evaluates the Spanish-language edition of the letters written by the Mexican poet Helena Paz Garro to the German writer Ernst Jünger, which were originally written in French. The reviewer had access to the original letters in the German Literature Archive in Germany and she compares the original texts with the…[Read more]

Latinx/o/a writing has existed long before 20th century state policies and publishing markets created the category we recognize today as “Latino/a literature.” This course will focus on the literary and cultural production of writers from the era of initial colonization through Latin American independence and the 19th century actions fueled by the…[Read more]

War diaries are often written under duress, and are attempts at documenting events as they unfold, or narrating stories of how people survive under trying circumstances. She argues that conditions of war under which authors produce their work dictate the form itself. When an author’s life is under threat, when safety is compromised, m…[Read more]

In Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte (2005) and in Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural (2000), the authors contemplate the nothingness that accompanies death, a concern that increasingly permeates their later writings. Although ‘death’ is depicted differently, the authors fear that with death “the universe wo…[Read more]

The glocal scale offers a more productive frame for analyzing the transculturation of theatre, particular Brechtian theory and practice, than either the singularly local or the generalized global. Glocalization brings into focus networks of imaginative representation that may be missed in overbroad applications of global frameworks, particularly…[Read more]